All posts tagged "hard drive"

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

"How to get a hefty new hard drive for your Mac without making your other gadgets jealous? Iomega is offering up a solution with the fairly elegant Mac Companion Hard Drive, a two or three terabyte external drive designed with Apple computers in mind that adds a high-powered charging port for your peripherals."

Nice looking and it fits perfectly doesn't it? You get some USB and FireWire ports as well as LED indicators for a visual of how full the hard drive is getting. It would be nice to have Thunderbolt connectors. Oh well, they are available for $295.00 for 3TB size, or $195.00 USD for the 2TB size.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

If you're looking for the most portable hard drive on the planet, look no further: Seagate has released the GoFlex Slim. It's a 320 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive that even inside the enclosure is only 9 mm thick. I'll be writing a brief review about this product in the coming weeks, but let me say this: it's crazy thin, and crazy fast - the USB 3.0 connection slurps down big files at over 150 MB/s based on a test I just did. Pricing is reasonable at $99 USD, and the drive has a really nice anodized finish. Mac compatibility right out of the box as well of course!

So if you want to get the Seagate Drive from Amazon.com [affiliate link], today is the day since it is a one day only deal according to the article. It is powered off USB so you won't have to carry a power cable with you, but you will have to format it since it comes formatted for Windows.

"SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. - September 21, 2010 - Designed to address the explosive worldwide demand for digital storage, Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) today launched the world's first 1.5 terabyte (TB) 2.5-inch portable external drive. Available immediately, the new 1.5TB FreeAgent® GoFlexTM ultra-portable drive delivers an all-in-one, technically advanced solution to help jump-start, build, store and enjoy libraries of digital content in one's preferred medium-whether on a Mac or PC, or a television, at home or on the go. With 1.5TB of capacity people can now store and carry up to 60 HD movies, 750 video games, thousands of photos or tens of thousands hours of digital music."

There's not a lot you can do to make hard drives exciting beyond offering them with more storage, or faster speeds - but Seagate is giving it their best shot with the FreeAgent GoFlex drive, which offers both. First we have the 1.5 terabytes of storage - that's an amazing amount of storage for a drive that you can fit in your pocket! They've added speed as well with the USB 3.0 connection; I don't have a single computer with USB 3.0 yet - and realistically, USB 3.0 won't be common until Intel and AMD support it at the core chipset level - but it's important for accessory makers like Seagate to bring products like this to the market to drive adoption. The nice thing about USB 3.0 is that it's backwards compatible with USB 2.0, so you're not losing anything by purchasing products with it - and when you to get a computer with USB 3.0, products like this one will become even faster. Nice!

Like all Seagate GoFlex drives, it comes with an OS X NTFS driver, so it will work on both your Mac and PC without re-formatting. And you can swap the cable for Firewire 800 (it's an additional accessory) if you're so inclined to get a boost in speed over USB 2.0 on your Mac.

A little bit of extra icing on the cake: you'll get a free digital copy of the most recent Star Trek movie, and the option to purchase unlock codes for 20 other Paramount movies. I wonder if it's an HD copy of the movie? I suspect not. Still, not a bad little bonus!

Thursday, February 18, 2010

"Mea culpa. If you bought a MacBook between 2006 and 2007 and your hard drive sounds like an unoiled rock tumbler trying to work its way through a belly full of rusty bolts, you could be eligible for a free replacement, courtesy of Apple."

According to Apple, a "very small percentage of plastic MacBooks may fail under certain conditions." So they are offering to replace the hard drive if you bring it in to a Genius Bar. The MacBooks in question are both the black and the white ones that were sold between May 2006 and December 2007. According to this page at Apple, the diagnosis is fairly simple: your computer stops working and at boot up, it displays a folder icon with a question mark on it. If you have already paid for a repair for this, you might be able to get a refund, and they are extending the eligibility to three years from purchase or August 15, 2010, whichever is longer.

Friday, October 16, 2009

"This week Apple released an update for Intel-based systems running Mac OS X versions 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Performance Update 1.0 is available direct from Apple for Snow Leopard and Leopard. It can also be downloaded via Software Update."

Basically this fixes the hard drive pausing issue that some are experiencing. Not sure your Mac is affected? You can go to the support page from Apple and see if it is on the list. If you need it, you can get it via Software Update on your Mac or go the Leopard or Snow Leopard update pages and download manually. This does require Mac OS X 10.6.1 or Mac OS X 10.5.8.

Friday, August 21, 2009

"Has your MacBook Pro's 7200rpm hard drive been emitting confusing noises? What about bugs while trying to use a wireless Mighty Mouse? If so, Apple's latest series of Software Updates may cure what ails you."

Apple acknowledged the problem with the hard drive about 10 days ago, and now they have the fix in for it, as well as the Bluetooth connectivity problems when using the Mighty Mouse and wireless keyboard. Bluetooth Firmware Update 2.0.1 fixes problems for any Mac that has Bluetooth based on the Broadcom chipset. The Hard Drive Firmware Update 2.0 only applies to the drives shipped in the June 2009 MacBook Pro.

Monday, August 10, 2009

"Owners of Apple MacBook Pro notebooks with 7200rpm 500GB hard drives have been complaining for months of clicking sounds followed by temporary stalling. According to Apple, a fix is in the works."

The problem has been happening in the 500GB drives that run at 7200rpm, with reports of a beep shortly before the hard drive clicks and the computer stops responding. There are several reports on the Apple forums that it is totally random with no correlation to a specific incident. According to Apple rep Bill Evans "We are aware of the issue and are working on a software update." Well half the battle is won by the acknowledgement, however they can't give a date for when the update will be available.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

"If your iPod is out of room and you don't want to do the necessary surgery on it yourself to upgrade the hard drive, some pros are now ready to do it for you. Rapid Repair just announced the first 240GB iPod upgrade, which is available for all original iPod Video models."

If I still had my iPod video, I'd so be right on this. 240 gigs is a nice upgrade. Of course, when I had my 5th gen video iPod, I only had a 160 gig HD on my iMac!